Exploring the Story of Bloodborne (Lore) • With SinclairLore and Richard Pillbeam

oh yes well you've come to the right place yarnum is the home of blood ministration you need only unravel its mystery and what a mystery it is one filled with intrigue murder evolution and monsters and to help make sense of it i've drafted the experts sinclair lore richard pillbeam jsf hello i was like is it jsk is it jsf no it's just it's not it's not any of that i don't use that name that's a relic from 2015 that i'm unable to shed oh uh you guys have been a tremendous help while i put together my bloodborne commentary and i thought we should do something special together so we're just gonna do the basic lore of bloodborne the story from beginning to end does that sound good [Music] let's say now uh just this is maybe not a part of the actual video this is not the snack covenant i expect a certain level of professionalism okay i thought that was funny well what acer doesn't know is that when other people added the podcasts i'm mostly professional oh since sin tends to behave herself when she's not in charge okay i thought it was a funny joke anyways um so i guess you're not that funny i'm gonna take that reaction from richie right now and i'm gonna edit that as the reaction to my joke i thought we should just look at first of all like the ancient world basically the old sumerian stuff just like the background of the universe the world before the story so that's more bergenworth what exactly is happening there what's going on in the world right now as we play through the game that's the choir and menses what are we doing uh and then what happens next that's more just like the ramifications of everything rather than speculation so uh the ancient world do we know what is the earliest part of the world of bloodborne well that's the thing because we actually don't um one of the things about bloodborne that is distinct from the dark souls games is that like they both do the there are successive ages things in the way that dark souls oh there's the age of ancients in the age of fire and the age of the deep and things like that bloodborne is superficially similar in that we have all of these different sort of periods of history that were a very long time ago and shaped the current world but bloodborne is also explicitly cyclical with them because we know like again a lot of bloodborne is done through implication rather than somewhat just being written on the sword somewhere there's no creation myth the cutscene in the menu no no and there's also not like there's not um there's not a lot of item text in bloodborne in comparison to the souls games so a lot of it is actually done just through like little vistas and little um vignettes and pieces of a visual design that sort of link everything together so the implication is and don't ask me for a citation because the citation is like a series of different images and things that we see throughout the game rather than a sword that straight up says this which is what you would get in dark souls that this is all cyclical and everything that's happening now essentially the same events occurred previously and because the events that are occurring now are contingent on the previous events presumably those events also happened before the things that happened now in this constant cycle that's going around and around and around so we actually don't really have a point of origin that's given for the first thing that happened in the world yeah we have the divide between like lauren and um and ease is represented again with willem and lawrence with the choir and menses uh it's always like you either just turn into beasts and everything kind of goes to hell or you become kin you become weird plant ethereal creatures um but there seems to be all of these cultures they always have they always become matriarchal because women are able to carry the children of the great ones they all find themselves queens they all also there seems to be like every single one of these cultures aspires at some point to transcend right yes um this is one this is one of the few things we're actually directly told through text is that um when our character successfully kind of transcends humanity and becomes this eldritch squid thing we're told that humanity has been lifted into its next childhood so the implication from that and also all these other things that we see is that you just have this with successive childhoods of humanity and sort of like so we we've become this eldritch squid thing and then everything will sort of reset and then we are not given a time scale but some huge amount of time in the future someone will stumble upon the ruins of jana and they will wonder what happened there and this will all play out again um they will find old blood and yarn yeah yeah um and yeah this is um this is what this is more more more pronounced in the dlc in the way they design that rather than the base game but the dlc is absolutely like pushing toward the idea that yeah this is cyclical this is going around and around and around and consequently we don't have a point of we have a point of origin for the events in january but like i said they are contingent on events in other places and we have a point of origin for those yeah and uh even in even in yharnam there does seem to be a few points where there is a bit of a timeline discrepancy right well we're mostly talking here about the um the dungeons are we because the um the dungeons have the dungeons have don't even seem to really have a timeline they seem to be like frozen points in history that you're visiting it's a sort of like taking dream memories sort of yeah well to me it's more like you know if you think about archaeology what you're doing in archaeology is you're like revisiting a point in time and it's just making that literal in that when you dig things up you actually are revisiting a point in time i uh i always thought of it as operating on similar-ish logic to the yharnam nightmare where you can you can meet rom when they ascended rom in the east chalice you can meet yeah queen yarnham back before uh assumably menses went in there and ripped her child out well an analogy to how the dungeons work is something rich has brought up in the past which is uzumaki oh yes yeah well like this is a very very vague connection but i think it's it's in there um so junji ito's ozumaki which i assume a lot of people are familiar with even if they haven't read it it's a manga about a city that is built above a sort of eldritch spiral that's underground and you don't know this at the beginning but that's sort of the reveal and there's the city is cursed by this spiral and everything in the city begins to warp and change into a spiral and then the reveal is that they start exploring what's underneath the city and they discover oh there is a gigantic alien spiral under the city that is kind of that's what's causing everything to warp and change and as they're descending into this spiral it becomes very similar to the chalices and bloodborne where you're discovering that the big secret of the city is buried under here and as they go further and further down it ends with the this moment where it's like well the deeper we go down the slower the time is going and once they hit the absolute bottom there is no time anymore everything is frozen in a single point and that's the the idea that eto influenced bloodborne i think is is like beyond question because there are enemies in the game that are straight up just ito designs that like this yeah like snails the snail women are just straight up from uzumaki the um a lot of the dlc like the fishing hamlet with the the lighthouses from the zamaki the the body of course is from the thing that drifted ashore um so is the orphan kind of so that to me is a good way of looking at the chalice dungeons that sort of the deeper you go the further back in time you're also going it's it's sort of making that that metaphor just physical but i mean like the the other reason that we're saying this is because it literally does not make sense otherwise because if you you have to assume that the chalices are held in specific moments in time otherwise you're like well why can i go down here and meet someone who's already dead why can i you know um why can't i uh like like queen yarnam is a good example because the entire game hinges on her child being taken from her when you and when you meet her above ground she has sure her abdomen is like she's not pregnant anymore and there's blood all over her dress and when you meet her in the chalices it's when she's pregnant and she's sort of at the height of her power and she's yeah so the in order for that to make sense you the version you meet in the chalices has to be from an earlier point in time in the game otherwise nothing makes sense and if you just say all right everything in the chalices is just like it is constantly it doesn't change then you know it all lines up yeah um i have a question this is to both of you because this is something i don't know if there is an answer to this or if this is just uh like the great ones come from the dreamlands but they also live in the chalice dungeons and they sleep there and they create these thumerians basically to guard their sleep um i actually have i guess a question to your question what do you mean by the great ones come from the dream ones i feel there was a isn't there some item which specifically says so they inhibit the drugs yeah which i think is is distinct from bill i mean there's like a bunch of stuff we can get into there the dreamlands are somewhere that your consciousness goes but your body doesn't need to follow this is this is somewhat confusing because you can do it two ways so like the way our character goes to the dreamlands in game is that we physically transport there like either a big spider thing grabs us and takes us or we touch something and disappear but then you also have people like mikalash who he is in the dreamlands but his physical body stayed in ghana he's like his physical body is a mummy in a chair and uh he is rom may is in the altar of despair maybe maybe we don't yeah um and then you have like like lady maria in the waking world she's dead we can actually carry bits of her body around with us but she's in the in the dreamland so and then we have things like the situation with um with cos who presumably did enter the waking world and that's how she was killed but at the same time even though cause is dead um she was like gutted and like organs were taken out of her and things she still persists because the people in the hamlet can call out to her for revenge and she will continue to haunt yanum until you put the orphan's spirit to rest at which point she will stop haunting yana so she's still around she's just her physical body's dead um so presumably like once you have sort of decoupled your spirit from your body you can exist in the dreamlands and possibly pop back into the waking world so uh assumably the great ones in the chalice dungeons that's where they sleep so that they can inhabit the dream i think it's something it well the um it's something like that because the the one the one like legitimate great one we run into in the chalices is ebriatus because amygdala is sort of a weird space where there's a bunch of them they seem like a species they seem like something that's just attracted to attracted to sort of eldritch activity and they just sort of show off some sort of cosmic vagabond yeah no or something like they they've got a good thing going on so they'll like attach themselves to a rift or something and just eat whatever's coming through um yeah is it british and they make a specific point that ebriatus was left behind by the other great ones they call her like the the left behind great one and there's these references to her weeping because presumably she's alone and the so what we can take from that is that well i guess all the other ones were sufficiently advanced enough that they projected themselves into the dreamlands and disappeared and ibritis is probably just not she's not quite powerful enough that's why she was left behind so what what the choir think of as this this sort of magnificent being that's beyond their comprehension is kind of the runt is kind of the one that that failed and they left her behind like wrong well yeah and that that i think is like probably why they stuck her with that rom corpse thing because it's like she this is what we talk about things being cyclical like ebrietus might be the wrong equivalent of ace um this thing that was left behind and like that they found her and brought her back and then she then encounters rom who's like oh this is this is like me i finally there is something else like me and then but that thing is dead so she's like even more alone than before well dead or just sleeping well the the rom corpses is one of the more confusing things because you can't get there until after you've beaten the wrong boss so there's my way to sort of test it but i think the idea that like that might be rom's physical corpse and the actual rom that we fight is in a dream makes more sense yeah i feel like imposter yosefka probably would have had the court prior to going to um yosefka's clinic yeah um you told me once richie this idea that sumerians were originally beasts driven like who were ascended to thumerians by the great ones so that they could watch over them is this a theory or is this something we know um it's well this is confusing because like the game went through a lot of revisions what i know from game that goes through revisions well one of the interesting things about bloodborne is that it went through all these revisions but they were revisions basically to they were like little like semantic things basically like yeah like um one character got split into two characters or two characters got combined into one character or like an important area got moved to the dlc or something like that but the core like plot the central thing about like you know the the blood and the beasts and the great ones and vampires and everything that was from what i can tell and this is going back to like 2011 i think when they first started that was pretty much always there so there's a bunch of stuff that was cut but it's like well it still fits with everything that we've seen it's still thematically connected it's not like some random like weird piece of text we dug up so there's no point where um one of the characters just magically happens to have like oh an everlasting fire that just knolls the entire point of the series would never do anything like that that would be ridiculous so um in the in in and this this this got as far as being recorded and they just cut the line but there's a reference to um what happens in old ian and there's a guy there's a cut npc who talks about what happened in old january he's from aldiana so instead of being like a church person who's like trying to explain it he's like ranting about what the church have done here and he says like all the beasts they're the true form of man they're the original form of man and we're like going back to that and that kind of makes sense um even if you discount that the idea that humans are like a midpoint who were then sort of like they were given this this blood that sort of like pushed them to a new stage in evolution and then if you take that blood again depending on your level of control you can either go forward or go backward that entirely i think fits with what happens and the way that like you know what make what makes the beasts what sort of characterizes them is this this greed for blood and then what happens next will you have these people who are vampires and they have agreed they have this greed for blood as well so it seems like you don't actually shed a lot of what um what is best deal about you and even like the beast runes and things when you equip them in the beast there's like certain weapons that rely on sort of an innate beast to it and like well the beast hood is just something that's in you so it's not like they're actually there's not a really a stark divide between human and kin and beast it's all just like one sort of continuum that everyone is somewhere along but yeah the idea that the great ones created the thumerians to guard them is like it's something that's in there but it's really vague it's like a couple of lines but it's sort of it's um yeah it's on the chat it's the original japanese willem line too right oh yeah that's the blood yeah because he says um the burgundy techniques yeah because it's in english it's we're born of the blood which like it's still kind of saying it like you know where we humans are born of the blood we're born of the blood made men by the blood which is essentially what like we were just saying and in japanese it's it's just more literal it's just like the blood makes us human yeah that's something uh maybe we should clean up in lore because the the beast skirt it's not a disease like the black plate no this isn't something you can catch virally this is very specifically it's not even quite a disease it's just that once you consume old blood your body becomes malleable yes and if you have great ones to guide your transcendence then you can evolve into something you can become a thumerian if not then you kind of just you're you have like the beast archetype is still within you and you just revert back to that which is why we have the witch of hemwick in the chalice dungeons we have the huntman's minions who become the merciless watchers we have these archetypes which repeat across all these yeah this is this is what we what i meant by like everything is cyclical yeah and even like little details like characters with with missing legs um characters who have like one eye covered in things those like those very distinct images repeat over and over again we have uh sumerians discovering trick weapons yeah yeah yeah this is a request yeah this is a good example where they'll say like okay german from his workshop created this combat style involving these transforming weapons and that's like probably true in the sense that he he independently created them but then when you start exploring history it's like oh in the like pre-human civilization they also had transforming weapons they had these like these sides that would split into two and stuff that's very similar to the weapon that eileen uses so you can see that like okay it just happens over and over again and um like i i talked about this with sin in a video that we did but like it seems like those are just reactions to the situation that you're in like if you're fighting a monster that is faster than you it doesn't make sense to stock up on like heavy plate male army you start wanting to dodge it you start wanting to move around it if you're fighting small things you you don't want to use big heavy weapons you want to use light weapons so it makes sense that you'll be able to switch between two um even like the themerians had had guns that the marians had a lot of things that we just find in yharnam and they didn't necessarily steal the idea from thumaru it's just like this is something that happens because you you need to come up with a solution to a problem um uh and yeah that's probably another point we should just make before we move on to uh the more contemporary story sumeru and yharnam they are like yharnam just spro it sprung out of thumuru where people kept building on top of the yeah this is this is like a casualty of um issues with design that forced them to change up how it worked a little but yeah the the dungeons in bloodborne are underneath yanum explicitly fumaro is um you're just going down because the initial plan would have been that you could just physically go from yanum to the dungeons it would just be like walking down um i guess similar to when you you go to that little cave under the clinic when you just sort of go down and i'm in there it was going to work something like that we don't have the exact um we never recovered like assets but based on like data and stuff that's how it would have worked and the way it's it's now works that you go to the dream and then you walk there makes it seem like the rarest is supposed to be but um you're like yeah if you look at what um how they're discussed like they will straight up say this is the labyrinth beneath yanum and then you have like that cave under the clinic that's clearly part of the chalices that they've broken into the whole backstory of byrgenwerth is that they dug up parts of those dungeons and started exploring them so fumaro is like i think inarguably just like underneath yarnum and you notice like motifs and the design and things recurring things that happened in the dungeons get recreated in yarn because literally it's just the top floor they just kept building and building and building up and popped out the top and you get um you get yarn the confusing part is that they then they then introduce lauren and ease which complete which i don't think it's actually possible to make sense of without like a lot of head canoning because lauren and esa described a separate like just distinct places and like lauren is in a desert like i i don't know i mean it maybe if you go down far enough this desert or maybe like it's just really far away or something like that but like yeah the implica yeah what lauren and ace really matter i think uh the lauren chalice i think it refers to lauren as a distant land yeah yeah is that maybe a translation issue i don't i just flat out i think it doesn't really make sense and i try not to think about it yeah yeah which is sad because lauren is one of the more um lauren actually becomes kind of important thematically to everything that's going on this is something that i've noticed actually in in sort of being a digital archaeologist in a sense going through all this is that like a lot of the things that are very resonant and like thematically important and tell you a lot about the world were the last things they did so like lauren becomes really important to this notion that like everything is is in cycles and all these ideas are happening over and over again and then you you actually like look at the development history and lauren was like really late a lot of things were like even like the character of lawrence was really late so like i again i talked to sin about this a few times but like it looks a lot of the things that do that that i think are the most important parts rather very late a lot of the very personal stuff was added late because it looks like um early versions like it was roughly the same plot but it wasn't really about the individual people it was more about the city so the notion is like the city is cursed because of what the city is built on top of and then seemingly quite late in the day they change it to the city is cursed because of what a group of people did and we actually encounter those people and learn about those people and that is so much more important to me that's so much more resonant because you're actually dealing with people it's like it's a personal story now it's not about like i wonder i wonder if that's a creative decision that you just you have a more nebulous story while you're designing the game so that you don't anchor any point of development to specific concepts which becomes a massive headache to fix later well i i sort of feel like they when they started they maybe weren't they just had like a massive ideas like it was like the nebulous massive ideas and then that gradually became it was like sort of like sharpening it until it it worked like the way they wanted it to so but yeah like the notion of like this city is cursed but it's cursed because of what specific people did and you can meet those people and you can see what they were doing to try to cover it up it becomes about like a lie that was told by individual people as opposed to like i'm in a creepy city and then like like it's initially initially which will be closer to like shadow over innsmouth or something or like i'm in a city and then i discover the secret if the city is this thing um whereas rather than like yes some it's not a personal like that someone did something that sort of like more like gothic mystery thing looks like that wasn't quite in there and you talked about them having a lot of different ideas in the beginning and as it goes on the ideas sort of get more refined and more pointed i guess uh that actually reminds me of something what have you heard about the animaka take your hitman i [ __ ] knew because you were making a little face when you started saying that i knew this is i know she's gonna say she's gonna start trolling us but i don't know exactly how thank you i hope you like that because i'll leave this in good good i'll leave it i was i was i made this video because i you guys have helped me so much and i i really want to direct as much traffic to you as i can because i love you both so much but i'm going to leave this in specifically because this is going to divert people away from your channel [Laughter] it'll divert people away from the channel except youtube's copyright people who will find the channel and take it down again yikes so the more contemporary story if i could just put it briefly bergenworth exists we don't know there's no inciting incident for it really it's just we have these scholars some from yharnam some just randomly i don't think any of them are for me on them no no just some humans then yeah uh and they basically they are philosopher mystics academics well yeah it did they um they're just like they're just scientists i don't know you know if you're keeping are you keeping video of this or are we just audio okay i'm doing air quotes here scientists in like a very broad sense where they're with it because i lean like if you look at the history of science like the notion of sort of neatly dividing it up into like well this is like a biologist and this is uh something else in this um there was just like the sciences and you would sort of look into like little bits and pieces of all of them so the idea of beer yeah so bergenworth are just like they're just um they're trying they're people who are trying to understand the world which is a mixture of it's a mixture of um like what you would call like hard sciences and also i hate the distinction but whatever it's a mixture of that and like they're also philosophers and just mystics and it's like how isaac newton he spent half of his time doing calculus he spent the other half doing yeah you have like characters like john d or edward d or whatever his name is it's just like we explore literally every facet of the world from as many perspectives as we can also it's that but like the perspective taken is still at least from what i from what you can glean the perspective is still a very um kind of 19th century empiricist one where they are they are trying i i just met i just met compared to yeah yeah that's what they did yeah well they they do that but they do it sort of with the attitude of uh like a 19th century empiricist basically saying well i just know everything like i figured things out by by cutting them up and looking at them so i don't need to like really open myself up to certain like the idea that other perspectives might be valid is not important and maybe uh maybe don't kill little that's that to me is like that's part of what makes the story resonate with me um like i was saying about like making it more personal because one of the things that keeps happening in the story is that they will they will try over and over again at this enormous human cost to understand what it means to transcend understand what it means to leave humanity behind and become something else but they try to understand it through like cutting things up and taking them apart and looking at how they work like in this what they think of as a sort of distant dispassionate way and they're like experimenting on people and injecting them with all these things just like measuring and like trying to figure everything out from that perspective and it never ever ever ever works and the only thing that actually does work is is a a parent-child bond that's where it comes from it's the notion that the these hyper-advanced organisms they're in a perpetual state of mourning because they've lost their children that's what they actually need to engage with and the whole story there's all these different factions they all attempt to to approach this question of transcendence from all these different perspectives and it never ever works until they actually just give up and say like that bond is what's important so that's why yes i think you start off with i think the implication sorry i think the implication with lawrence specifically is that at some point after just being the biggest prick in the world he would have realized you know what i've kind of taken things too far i need to ditch the healing turrets i need to ditch you know all this infrastructure i've created and i need to meet back up with german because i we need to get a grip over what i've unleashed and in when he meets with german he's able to uh with the court from annelise he's able to make audience with the great ones and it when he goes like hey german i'll free you like i i know i've given you kind of a rotten deal i'm gonna go and fetch another one of these and i'm gonna free you so it seems like at the end he did come to understand it yeah because and that's true of like all these factions they have like mklash who is seems to be kind of lawrence's like again this is all done through like implication and like sort of vagus connections but seems to be kind of lawrence's apprentice or lawrence's second in command or just like lawrence's simp or something who when he when it's time for him to like continue on this great work um he just he digs again importantly he digs up an old part of the city he doesn't do it in the big fancy workshop he goes to this very old sort of forgotten place and just conducts this mass human sacrifice because like it's just sort of like like just giving up before this thing you don't understand saying i don't understand you so i am it's like i am yeah the reason that it gets to me specifically is that you have this thing i don't understand it like the great ones this sort of like what's beyond humanity it's like i will understand i will understand it and hacking it up and looking at it and trying to figure out i have to figure out how this works to figure out how all these organs like i have to figure out what quantities of blood and what quantities of water and how they interface with certain kinds of plant just doing all this and then realizing i don't understand this i can't understand this the only way for me to engage with it is to engage with it on its rules and just sort of like it's like dropping to your knees and saying i don't know so i am just going to have to do it like i just i'm following the lead of this thing now i'm not i'm not beyond it i'm not above it i have i'm going to have to go mad yeah yeah exactly like my my mind is too limited to get the framework yeah so i need to break the limitations of my own mind and then i'll be able to yeah yeah yeah or they could just watch some what where why they could do that and that's a like a mid-episode plug here lit i think you guys have done literally a top an episode on everything in bloodborne i remember distinctly watching a playlist of like the notes of blood form and i was like oh that's a funny joke literally all the notes well where's like sin said to me we're doing notes with blood body also said oh that's a funny joke and then yes sin um sin does want to do this is the how we sort of met because sin knew that i knew a lot about bloodborne and she had some questions she's like can you explain this thing and it's like all right we'll do this and then i we i just stuck around basically um yeah um i feel like that's actually been weirdly useful because bloodborne's story is like it's a little different to the other souls games so maybe looking at it like the way that everything is kind of connected to everything else in some way maybe looking at like every individual note and every individual enemy sort of does help because it helps you create this sort of web of seeing how everything's connected because like if you look at like um like dark souls 2 particularly there's all of these like kingdoms and all of these like characters you hear that characters you need and unites who are sad but a lot of them aren't actually connected to anything else because it's like i'm not there's not a criticism it's just like it's trying to create a whole world so you just hear like here's this kingdom it's like here's elkin and ven and they had a thing going on and then here's kareem they had a thing going on but they're not necessarily interconnected in any way it just feels like it's just a bunch of stuff happened whereas in bloodborne like because it's the smaller scale thing because it's like one it's one it's one night it's very local it's a it's a game that takes place over one night in one city and then there are places outside of the city but they're just like outside the city they somehow connect back to it like bergenworth or hamwick that's like as like a town outside of it so everything is connected to everything else in a lot of ways and that makes it sort of interesting to talk about um and interesting to sort of try to talk about holistically i guess because you can if you can bring up one thing it's probably connected to something else and they probably like they're not just um the thing is like they're not just connected narratively a lot of them actually aren't necessarily connected narratively but they will comment on each other like like um there's a lot of churches in bloodborne but all of them give you a slightly different perspective on what is happening in that church like a good example is um you go to like again this that you can do this at any time but let's assume you do it in this order if you go to like old janam you see the blood starved beast and it's in this like destroyed church and there's a beast by the altar with a chalice and then it's all ruined and the town is on fire and everything and then you go to cathedral ward and you see a church that is yet to be destroyed but outside of it there are the the servants with the crucifixes where you would have put a a burning beast in aldiana and there is a woman by the altar and then she turns into a beast and you see oh all right i saw where this is going already and now i'm seeing sort of what led to that and then later on you see like in the nightmare of menses there is another like very similar church thing but this time it's a spider because like it's going in this direction now and you can see how all these things kind of interconnect as opposed to like you know like in dark souls 3 where there's just like we need a way to connect these two areas or you just walk through a church look at the church with the outrider that's just like this is the party type but it's not clear what what did they do here was this a church too where is it it sleeps to church because we just needed a space yeah so that's sort of that's why i think like even though it's born out of sins obsession with cataloging literally everything in the game um it it is like i think it is helpful it is a valid like approach to making sense of it all yeah and the reason rich and i sort of met in the first place is because i love bloodborne very much and i was obsessed with the lore and i was trying to find answers that maybe were not obvious or maybe didn't even exist but richie was able to sort of answer my questions and provide some context and information and i think that the individual episodes are kind of good because like richard said bloodborne is so interconnected that to explain one concept you have to explain another you have to explain like why is lawrence the bloodletting beast in the dungeons well because we find the skull in the church what church that church the healing church who found it at lawrence when well you know he wasn't bergenworth and then him and lawrence didn't agree what's bergenworth well so i just feel like you just have to explain so many things yeah yeah that explains branches and individuals so many directions yeah yeah everything is is it's like this gigantic web where everything is connected to everything else and things don't make sense in isolation and i think that's why it has that reputation for being like the story is so confusing you're never exceptional and like i don't it's not confusing it's actually extremely straightforward and consistent it's just that everything is is kind of connected to everything else in a way that's can be a little vague if you're not like actually laying it out because like i i think like again like it sounds weird that we've got all these episodes out of this story and i'm saying it's not confusing but like it's it really isn't like if it was confusing i don't think i would care yeah like knowing as much about the story as i do i look at it and i'm like well this i i look at like the forbidden woods and i go oh well this is obviously an area meant to like explore the idea of vermin like you you look at the snakes that have like the giant snake balls that have ticks on them you look at the villagers who have like the snakes blowing out of their heads walter is located there but if you don't get like it is very easy to go through the game and only think oh vermin are like an online item they're like collectibles yeah no no that's like a big theme in the game yeah that reoccurs many many times yes it's a thing miyazaki does this a lot like in the other games as well where you'll he'll basically tell stories backwards where you'll see you'll see the effect of something and it will have no context and then what that chunk of the game will be about is about deciphering the cause of what happened but i think because because you do it in that order and also because like bloodborne is kind of difficult so in between each plot point there might be like five hours of you dying and like struggling through an area and then when you finally get to the end and you see something like what the hell is this whereas if you if you had just seen those two things in order to be like oh it's that um pale blood's a really good example of that i was just thinking that [ __ ] pale blood you know how you find a node that says seek pale blood to transcend the hunt what does it mean you will never remember it until your next playthrough and you'll be like oh what can i this is the thing people just arguing about pale blood for going on six years now so like he he this is the pale blood situation um like it's actually really straightforward just going off what's in the game it's like you start the game as a note see pale blood to transcend the hunt what the hell is pale blood i have no idea go talk to gilbert gilbert says i don't know what pale blood is but try seeking out but try going to the church go to the church uh amelia turns into a monster so you don't find out what pale blade is way way later on you find a note on the ground in like the church's secret sacrifice place that says behold a pale blood sky oh all right then you find german's old workshop there's a no there's not a note but it's on the on the chord description says like yeah this is how we beckoned the pale moon it's like oh okay then um way way later on uh you you beat up a spider and the sky goes purple and giant red moon shows up and then um you you find a note again that says like lawrence's moon monster was summoned lord says like lawrence's moon thing pale blood and at this point you don't know anything about like the moon presence because you haven't met it yet and then you get to the end and then you meet lawrence's moon monster and it's like oh this is where they summoned the pale moon presumably pale like again this is like a translation thing that should it was pale black um so when the pale moon is here and then like if you successfully beat the um the moon presence you become a a great one and transcend so just lining it all up like it's a very basic thing which is like it's it's a standard mystery structure of like i'm looking for pale blood what is pale blood i'm conditioned to think it's a kind of blood because it's yanum there's a everyone's obsessed with blood i'm just looking for this blood then it turns out no it's actually a reference to this like red moon that comes down and this like this weird sky that's pale blood so by seeking the pale blood which is actually like the moon thing in the sky i was able to transcend the hunt by becoming something other than human so it is literally just that but because that is told in such a fragmented way over such a long period of time it took on this significance as like this thing that can never be understood when it's just that yeah that's um that's actually one thing about bloodborne which i think is a massive like downgrade from uh coming from demon souls and dark souls demon souls had the monumental dark souls had frampt and coth dark bloodborne does not have like a character who just guides you through the adventures yeah that's like a real it's really strange that german for example like why isn't it german you just go back to him over and over again and he's like okay look you went to the grand cathedral nobody was there oh uh well probably you can find some answers in bergenworth yeah and but instead it's just like you talk to gilbert you go to the healing you go to the grand cathedral you learn about birgenworth you talk to alfred on your way there who talks a bit about berg and like you're just it's separated amongst so many different points yeah and like um it's like you said like there's gilbert seems to be the one guiding you but then after emilia he basically does nothing of significance and then um yeah like and they sort of addressed that in the dlc by adding simon i love simon is like the closest you get i believe sin has a question she's gesturing at me so i'm gonna have to disagree with you guys on that i actually liked it that it didn't have somebody telling you what to do or where to go because it felt very different lost in the world felt like a mystery yeah very different from a regular game where you have somebody pointing somebody telling they're like there's no map and this was my first soulsborne experience for some reason my boyfriend thought that was a good idea to give it to me on my birthday knowing i have never played a souls game before but you know eventually eventually i grew to love it and i really at first i did not like the fact that there were no pointers there were no markers there was no map there was no pause there was nothing but you sorta know what i said cut out me being stupid uh acer yeah cut out every time i go um and just like take too long and say something dumb yeah but um yeah um but once you get used to all those things you almost feel like all the other games are lacking the lack of map and pointers and people to guide you so i actually really appreciated it because it felt like it felt like something i think you rich and i talked about when we talked about kingsfield where it doesn't feel like the world was made for you it just feels like you're a character put in a world to explore it you know yeah but like to to me the difference is also that in in the dark souls games and in demon souls even though you don't you're not guided around as much you still have this overarching goal which is like oh and dark souls like gotta ring those two bells and that's pretty much all the direction that you get and you know like one is above and one is below and that's sort of all you've got to go and you've got to go find them and you're not given much direction like where to go how to get there but you know roughly you've got to ring two bells that's over i can go dark souls 3 it's like got to find the lords of cinder demon souls has got to kill the demons to to link the archstones bloodborne um bloodborne has got to find pale blood for the first like third and then you just don't have a goal anymore things just sort of happen um and like going over older versions of it like you did initially have like there was an overarching goal to it which was you you you would have traveled to yarn and with a friend of yours who went missing and your goal was to find the friend so it was set up from the beginning like this is a detective story this is a mystery you're trying to you're literally driven to overcome like this city to to like excavate it to find out what happened whereas this one's like you're just some schmuck who wakes up and it's like hey go kill beasts and that sort of all that but at no point no one ever actually says like you might want to think about going to that bergenworth now it just never happens and like again like there was there there was there's another another version that's like this is what i mean it's the same story the same things happen but there is there is like you said there is a character who basically says to you oh like when you beat the amelia equivalent who's like yeah okay like oh thank you um if you want to fix the problem in yharnam you have to go to this university that's through the forest but that that's completely absent the closest you get is like alfred mentioned and i i think he's sort of getting it that when he's like everything that's sacred to yharnam is in bergenworth which makes you think oh i guess pell blood's there but um yeah and he's just like can very conveniently located on the path to bergen yeah so you're like oh you need some lore about birkenworth i guess yeah so yeah um going back going back to my outline uh which you guys have rudely destroyed oh no um so what is actually going on well we didn't really talk about like the world before the story but like basically bergenworth they found the chalice dungeons and they thought hey wouldn't it be a neat idea if we tried to evolve and become great once ourselves and willem was like hmm this this rom character that we managed to create that wasn't so good maybe maybe we need to uh meditate yeah and basically just rot our brains and lawrence was like nah we just experiment i'm ready now basically yeah and lawrence all that stuff in cainhurst all that stuff that's happening in yharnam everything goes to hell uh like we said earlier he and german construct a dream to give themselves a fighting chance to finish off the beast uh in the world right now what is actually like what is our character uh what is going on right now with like the choir and menses um wait we're not gonna talk even a little about the best parts of bloodborne the best parts of bloodborne are first of all as you mentioned there's birgenworth and then there are these scholars who find the dungeons but then they go into the dungeons and they realize that because they're scholars they don't know how to fight can confirm so richie called sin to take care of the beasts i would so the scholars call hunters to take care of the beast and i think this is very interesting because that points to hunters existing in yharnam oh yes so the hunters predate the uh yes girds of the beast yeah richie since richie and i have a very interesting relationship when i can direct richie to a conversation but he's much better than me at talking he is more experienced and experiences less anxiety so richie could you please elaborate on the hunters and them existing before bergenworth and scourge and all that stuff thank you sin okay so like zen was saying um the the recent history of yharnam involves the bergenworth scholars excavating the chalices and when they the chalices are the dungeons i know it's confusing sounds like they're digging up a cup which they kind of are but they they go into these dungeons and they discover the dungeons are full of weird monsters and there's beasts in the dungeons so this is one of the confusing things because it's not it's not ever directly stated what the sequence of events here is the order is but we know that bergenworth and the hunters ended up working together so it makes sense that like well clearly what happened is they went into these dungeons that were full of weird monsters they're a bunch of scholars they don't know how to fight anything so they recruit these hunters as basically gods as people who can help them explore the labyrinth and that raises this question of like oh okay so there were already prior to there being healing church prior to anyone digging this blood up there were already people who specialized in hunting beasts and like they are like when german is recruited as like when you you see like german this is again this in a trailer but it's a trail that from made so um you see german german as a like prior to the events of the story and he's already oldish then it's like about 20 years beforehand we think but he looks to be in his like 50s or 60s so there's already like you can you can be a beast hunter who's been hunting beasts all their life in this world before there is a healing church so again the simplest way to look at it is that well i mean yharnam's already got all this blood like it's already there they already have like churches where they're worshiping it and stuff they're probably already based zenyano um and people turning into shitanyana it's just that the healing church exacerbated it the healing church kind of like just made it really really bad by by prodding it and experimenting with it yeah yeah another thing that i find interesting that acer skipped over is that resa so bad um when bergenworth employed the hunters willem got word of a fishing helmet where a great one stayed and they went to the fishing hamlet i'm assuming at willem's request to encounter a great one named cars but what did they go um sorry did they go specifically because of cars or did they just go because they found like these fish men are strange and there's probably something we can learn from them this is where i was going actually richie pointed it was it richie i'll just say generally sorry we talked about this on a podcast and there is a chant by the inhabitants of the fishing hamlet that specify how the hunters encounter cars richie could you elaborate oh okay yeah so this is something that's in the game but it's really easy to miss because of how it's done so you know in the fishing hamlet area you can hear all these women talking when you're near the houses this like that's all like those are actual like lines of dialogue and they just played over each other so you can't you have real trouble distinguishing them i remember vardy actually did a video where he stayed in front of the the the thing recording it trying to like piece together what they were saying it's borderline impossible because it's all these whispers overlaid over other whispers but um now that we have the game like dumped and cracked and extracted we can listen to all those files separately and they give you the story which is that like um they say uh because we have beckoned now causes no more forgive us and because we have beckoned now cos is dead so you get from that okay they actually called cause to shore and that's where she was killed because prior to that like it was very confusingly worded because they would you would go to the beach causes corpse would be there you would get the item in the item would say that this was discovered when the body of course washed ashore which led to this whole thing about like well was caused dead when everyone arrived or was was she killed on the shore because the way it's described as she was already dead and like i told i talked to you about this and i don't know if it made it into your commentary about some the drifted ashore god yes you did yeah uh that is in the video yeah yeah so we when it came out i i was partial to the idea of the drifted ashore god because i liked the idea of the hamlet worshipping something that was already dead they're just worshipping a corpse but then the more we looked into it it's like no it does seem like cause was like a life they called cause to the shoreline and then she was killed there yeah yeah i uh i specifically would theorize that if it's drawing from shadow over in smith they made deals with the sea dwelling deep ones to get more gold i think the implication with all the fish in the area is that probably there was no fish they packed in the cost like the uh drifted ashore got and it was like hey can you please give us fish and there's a lot of fish so clearly cost delivered there's a lot of drugs because you can see this is the thing about the hammer because those aren't efficient no no this is this is the thing about the hamlet you can see all around that there is all this fishing gear there's like nets and harpoons and those little like floating ball things they use to to catch fish they're everywhere but they're not being used anymore they're all like rusted and old and there's all these ships like they would have been used to fish but the ships are all like they're all discarded they're all sinking and then you find this massive space that i think at some point was probably like like a fishery like somewhere where they would they would gut fish or something and now it is just slugs so what has happened is that this they were at some point of fishing village they encountered cars and cos provides this source of slugs that they'll just live off the slugs now to prevent them having to go into the ocean and as someone who keeps slugs i can confirm that if you get one slug and there's no predators within a couple of months you will have about 20 slugs and then each one of them will produce another 20 slugs so it's not hard if you get one slug you can very easily imagine that becoming the staple food source of the hamline but yeah like um interestingly those those slug models that you see in the fishing hamlet that are like all over the ground and stuff if you have the cos parasite and the milkweed rune when they synergize you actually use those slugs as an attack like it's it's like there's it's the same model like literally the same thing you can vomit those slugs out as projectile weapon so it is clearly like the cause parasites uh like even though the thing you get doesn't look like like a slug it looks like a weird um i don't know what it looks like it's like a like a precambrian flower or something it looks it looks a bit like uh like this silky little cloth yeah yeah but um that thing when that is in you you have the cause parrot like the cos parasites are the weird like the slugs from the hamlet it's the same model and they're now inside your body so you can see how it all sort of like lines up and um those parasites are phantasms which um which are the vermin of great ones definitely um counter pointed with the vermin because there's the notion of like these are the two paths there's like the beasts and the great ones and they're sort of opposites and lauren yeah so examples because the blood drug hunter eye is someone who's got vermin and it specifically says this i rotted this i collapsed in on itself it's like it's not it's like just a pile it's like the remnants of an eye whereas you have the black sky eye which is full of phantasms and that's like it specifies this thing is really like this is like nice like firm and well preserved eyeball in the game it's like it's making a point of like well the eye is knowledge the eye is enlightenment so when you have these phantasms they actually keep the eye fresh they keep the eye like pure when you have the blood drunk one the verb then make the eye rot out so yes you can also make the comparison between um those snake infested villagers versus the um the brain suckers the brain sucker has all of these arcane magics at their disposal yeah and i think going back to what i was saying earlier the reason why i really like that part is because that is something we talked about more recently whereas before i didn't picture the hunters coming in a village and just being like hi we're just here to talk could you summon your great one and when the great one is summoned basically the hunters just start killing everyone it's like very horrible very impactful yeah that's what i mean about it working better as a personal story because if it had just been like it was this was found like they saw that in sakura where um ashina's built atop the mebu village and there's this sort of like there's this story there about like sort of the damage that was done to nebu village and the way maybe village has like been cut off from fountainhead all the stuff but it's it's all sort of like politics it's like how these things relate historically and and you know how like the the interactions worked whereas in bloodborne it's that but it's also like this is a bad thing german did and that to me like that sort of has more immediacy to me because it's like oh okay german did something terrible and now he's tortured by it and like lawrence did something terrible and maria did something terrible and you see how that impacts on actual people yeah yeah another thing that i find interesting is the schism that developed between lawrence and willem and i find it interesting because when i started being interested in war like five years ago there was one perception of the schism whereas after i talked to richie i saw it in a different way oh yeah that this has been like a confusion which is still being cleaned up in the uh bloodborne lore right you're talking about well this side versus this this is something that actually loops around to the question 20 minutes ago about like the choir and menses so i think i think we can make we can maybe get this thing home on time so um what happens at lawrence and willam is that if you like this what is that they split over the use of the old blood willem says no no no and willem willem says no no no and lauren says yes i can that's essentially like what happened and then that leads to within the sort of people who were looking at the story the assumption that oh okay there's the schism is over whether or not you should ever use this blood or whether you should use this thing that is called insight and this was like all over the place when it started it was it was in that video vardy made and i think that's sort of what codified it for a lot of people but the difference is okay birgenworth is all like we need eyes on the inside we need to make our brains more powerful we need to like get all this insight all this enlightenment and then the church is the opposite and it's like no no blood blood blood blood blood good inject people with blood make monsters and what it really is is that they both want the same thing they both want to make humans transcend to become the great ones to trend to become superior beings to become this like new super race they both intend to do so with the old blood they both want to use the old blood the difference is that willem sees the problems that is causing in bergen worth so you see like on the metamorphosis you know the weirdly you don't see beasts in birgenworth but like if you read the metamorphosis text it's like okay they it just says like um excesses of d a deviation and excesses like it says like the metamorphosis cause these like deviations these successes though in english um in english it specifically says evolution without courage will be the rune of our race right yeah yeah yeah well that's that's another thing yeah that's not the that's not the metamorph okay forget it go ahead i'll do that cut it um so what what's happening with willem and lawrence is that at birgenworth they were both messing around with this old blood and it was causing what is described on the metamorphosis rune as excesses of deviation so we don't really find out much about exactly what those were we just know they existed but it lines up with okay blood metamorphosis deviation we don't know exactly what it turned into and then willem places this bam on the blood as a result of that so like presumably rom is one of those that i'm like rom is like on the path to becoming a great one but didn't quite make it the idea being she's the vacuous spider she's vacuous because she's not enlightened enough to control this blood so even though she's somewhere on the way to transforming into a new species it doesn't quite work it sort of aborts and leaves her as this like you know the vacuous spider she's like kind of dumb but she's she's got some arcane powers so what happens is after all these like issues arise um willem says and this is the text in game it's confusing he says evolution without courage will be the ruin of our race which basically means that um this is clearer in japanese where it's like a deviant evolution or a degenerate evolution or whatever will be our rule and the idea is okay we're evolving but if we don't get this right we will be destroyed we will end up like lauren we will be like uh we will turn back into beasts it will be all elvis will be for nothing we will destroy humanity so he says stomp and that's what the bergenworth adage is getting at when it says um we're born in the blood made men by the blood undone by the blood and then he says our eyes are yet to open fear the old blood that's one statement it's not our eyes are yet to open fear the old blood it's like our eyes are yet to open fear the old blood fear the old blood because our eyes get too open so he's okay we need to get ourselves get our brains working in such a way that we are enlightened enough to control this blood because we should not be dabbling in this if we're not smart enough we don't understand it and that's why when you find willem he is on his little lunarium in his rocking chair looking at the moon because he is thinking and he's trying he's like meditating and he's like i've got to like i'm trying to get in touch with the great ones i'm trying to make myself think differently i've got this like chord from the child of a great one and i'm just thinking and thinking and thinking to try to make most of my eyes yeah exactly trying to get internal stimulus he's he's he's like sensory deprivation willem trying to like make his brain work differently lawrence breaks from them because he says no no i'm ready now i can do this now i just need to like just experiment and experiment and experiment and that's how i'll do it so the break between them is not blood versus eyes on the inside blood versus insight it's just willem is an old conservative um timid person who is worried about what will happen and lawrence is the younger ambitious kind of hubristic one who says no no no i can do this that's what the break is that's why when you they make this clear in the dlc but that's like you go to the research or what happens in the research hall you stick like a symbolic eye inside of a skull to make the thing go up the people there like this there's a couple of beasts there but it's mostly just people with giant heads because they're experimenting to try to get there like they're trying to contact the great ones through their heads they're not trying to make superhumans they're trying to do the exact same thing willem was doing just basically without regulations without anyone telling them to stop so then they're trying to yeah it's basically like factory assembly line yeah yeah and dumping inside into these people's rights so then the healing church becomes this extremely powerful organization because like they are like they have access to the old blood which is like part of yharnam's history i've talked about this a little bit before i don't know for a lot of time to go into running out of time now but the idea is like yanum uh because they are descended from thumaru they are obsessed with like their own blood their own superiority they're very insecure like yarn and blood is like you know ghana blood is like the most potent blood like you can like outsiders cannot partake of our blood a bunch of outsiders show up with like hey we've got some of that blood that you guys are obsessed with and it's way more potent because it's like it's from even further back in history um it's like it's like this is like the apple it's is like the pure stuff this is like pure pure yarn and blood that's why they become so powerful so what happens is that because they're so powerful um they become a very large organization bergenworth are quite small and this is where we get this split the same split essentially happens because at some point in recent history we don't really have a set timeline but at some point within recent history um lawrence's plan categorically fails it blows up in his face lawrence is transformed into a beast and dies the church are left leedless um and then yharnam turn on the church so everything has gone horribly horribly wrong but because this has happened over quite a period of time um we're not again given a set time scale but i think about 20 years is probably right since lauren shows up from laurent showing up to where we are now and what happens is when lawrence shows up and he's making his big important healing church he recruits a bunch of orphans from yharnam that are like children and he raises them to be like the next generation he makes sure they're like very very educated and like they're very very like they've learned all these things they spend all day meditating they spend all day looking at the sky and things like that to try to make his own like the next generation of like super enlightened scholars he dresses himself up as william as we can see in the steps yeah he's basically trying to reproduce birds yeah he's trying to reproduce so by the time lawrence screws up and there's really no question that lawrence is screwed up you have these two groups within the church so you've got the choir who are the orphans who are a little more independent and then you have um the school of menses who are again this is one of those things like they don't straight up say cause it's all done through implication but the leader of the school of mensis is mikalash nikolaj is dressed like he is from bergenwood so and he talks about rom he talks about stuff he would only know about if he were at birgenworth and mikalash's age in game um like everyone's got an age slider his age in game is like middle-aged so it makes sense that okay well when lawrence left for found the healing church he probably wasn't the only one who left already took other people with him so mikhail also me have been in the nightmare for some time well no but what i'm getting at is like mikalash probably as a younger man in his like when he would say like if virgo is a university like say mikala she's an undergrad he's like in his 20s um and lawrence is like a senior academic in maybe his like 30s or 40s um they leave together so at this point in the game like lawrence is an older man mikalasha's old mikalash is like in his 40s now lawrence would be in his like 60s and he's but he's dead so who cares so mikalash um seems to want to just carry on what lawrence was doing because you get the impression he is sort of like it's not that lawrence's plan was wrong if lawrence wasn't smart enough and you see that with like the way he talks he babbles constantly during his boss fight and he's very very dismissive of ron he's very very dismissive saying like you know we'll just like um he says like like as he's talking that he's praying to cause and again like he knows who kaz is which very heavily implies he was at burgundy saying as you once did for the vacuous ron grant's eyes so he's like he just wants to get to carry on what they were doing that's kind of what the school of menses is so the split happens within the healing church because the choir are aware that lawrence is screwed up and they start taking like going back to berger north just somewhere that they've never been to they presumably learned about it so they have started to go back to burgundy maybe this maybe this willem guy was right willem had the right idea that like we're just not enlightened enough to control this blood yet so when you go to where the remnants of the choir are um it's like a big open space with like this sky above it and it mentions like this the choir out there looking at the sky you see there's the um the the balcony with the make contact corpse on it because that's and that person is doing what willem is doing they're outside all night looking at the sky trying to make contact with the stars in the same way willem is trying to make contact with it so there's that's what that break happens and then throughout the game you see this like behind the scenes war between them where memphis are sending out like uh people to like mess up to mess with the choir so you see like there's like a dead quiet person who's held captive where menses are in your heart nancy's scholar damian is a character who was added in the dlc um as a summon but like when you summon him he's summoned specifically to wreck the choir's [ __ ] like a british yeah like wrong yeah because the big this is again like the scattered notes in the game that um if you just read the text it's like this could be from anyone but if you actually look at where they are it's a different story it's like there is a note that says like um basically hey there's this big spider out there don't touch it because if you touch spider holds all manner of secrets or all manner of rituals because true enlightenment need nothing yeah yeah it said something yeah yeah it's like true enlightenment need not be shared um the japanese is a lot more imperative it's like the enlightenment must not be shared so that and that you find that near a member of the choir who is in bergenworth so presumably the idea is okay that person from the choir they came to bergenworth they met ron they realized what was going on they raised if we mess with this spider and the red moon comes down we're all dead so they leave this note saying like do not damage the spider do not touch the spider the spider is is hiding enlightenment but you don't want the enlightenment because basically you're not ready for enlightenment yet and then what we get in that area is you can also summon mensa scholar daemian who will proceed to kill wrong so yeah yeah um um so that that's your little that's the the that's the schism happens again basically because the choir realized that maybe willem was right and humans aren't um aren't ready yet but again like because willem is so conservative because he's so kind of s sedentary i don't know how you describe him but basically he is in a situation where because he was so worried that humans weren't weren't enlightened enough he never did anything because it was never going to be perfect whereas lawrence rushed into it and it messed up for him as well um bouncing off of true enlightenment need not be shared uh that's basically saying if you screw with the spider the red moon is going to appear the red moon uh it's it is it is basically a it's kind of like old blood for the mind where it just rem like the old blood makes the body malleable the red moon it breaks the limitations of the mind which is why everybody goes insane once it happens i i think it makes everything like it it makes the world malleable like the world that actually makes yeah every everything but yarn might merge through yahara ghouls yeah like everything just like it's like the veil between worlds is pierced so like this is um it doesn't this thing is like it doesn't necessarily turn you into a beast it does if you've been messing with old blood so some people just going mad um imposter yosef is a good example where like she is trying to use the red moon to make herself into a great one but she's out there she's gone she's got a cord under the red moon trying to think think think think think to like control the transformation but then like someone like gilbert because gilbert was given this big dose of blood administration he does transform and then you have like um like the people in in yahoo who just meld into a wall you have the people in the chapel who just go insane you have ariana for yeah ariana gasps yeah it's almost like the red moon is that amplifies whatever's going on is ariana's pregnancy connected to the red moon i i had always assumed that um and i put this in the video and i'm not changing it uh you're assuming it's connected to erden yeah my am i thinking no it it it's that the red moon like there's another node in burgundy that's like um the boundary between worlds oh no yeah this boundary yeah they talk about the boundary between man and beast but like the japanese is just like the boundary the the yeah the boundary of man the boundary of the mistake yeah so what happens is like the red moon when that's in the sky like the the boundary is broken so the great ones have a little more potential to like reach through that's why you suddenly get amygdala all over your heart after the red moon like this it's the the red moon um reveals the amygdala the one in urdu chapel is always there the one outside yahoo goal is always there but the ones inside yahoo only show up when the red moon happens so the idea is like that just made it more permeable they showed up as a result of that um yeah all right so we come into yharnam our character comes into yharnam for blood transfusions for god only knows this is the there's two two little confusing things here the first is that we are never told why we came to january um no but in all the pre-release information all the like interviews and things miyazaki is just like very very straightforwardly casual about it he says you came to yharnam because you were sick and you wanted to get a blood transfusion to fix the sickness and um there's actually like there's deleted lines at the beginning where the blood minister just says like oh yes the sickness that ravages your homeland and these don't include it so it's something that like it seems to be that you were sick they just didn't say it in game but then you also have the issue of pale blood because yeah because assumably our character asked about it yeah because the first line in the game is oh yes pale blood well you've come to the right place so we're the ones that said like hey i'm looking for this pale blood do you have it in yarn and then he's like uh that's the right if you want to look for it we probably got something and um probably got some yeah yeah and uh if you look at like when you wake up the bandages and things that you're wearing if you inspect those it says like yeah this probably is something that you would wear if you were a foreigner but no one knows because you don't have a memory anymore so you came to yharnam and you remember asking about pale blood but nothing else and everything else is like a blur and you don't you don't actually remember where you came from and then you have the handwritten scroll the handwritten scroll um the japanese again it says like it's like described as um it's like note in basically note in a person's handwriting meaning it's like it's a distinct handwriting that you recognize doesn't say who's so the implication very strongly is that that is yours like you came with that note that says because yeah the note doesn't make any other sense like it doesn't make sense maybe if the blood minister left it but even then well i yeah but again like the blood minister doesn't know what pale blood is so the the idea is either you you wrote that to yourself or someone wrote it and gave it to you and you just don't remember you recognize the handwriting but that's all um so we apparently also came to yharnam looking for pale blood but it's not clear why and it's not clear how much we know about it because it just says seek pale blood to transcend the hunt and uh as we go through the game we kill beasts we uh be okay so here's one the reason we don't go blood drunk is because we have the doll who's able to uh eliminate that yeah whole business yes yeah um so this is again going back to translation stuff and this is also another thing that was added really late but it works really well um is that you don't level up from blood you level up from what's called the echoes of what and okay what the [ __ ] is an echo of blood um so the echo of blood is a translation of a term that we don't have um in in english you can see why they're going with echo of blood because they're trying to go for something more poetic but it's like um the the left behind sort of like longing for or like need or like feelings toward blood dying well um you the thing is you could call it like it's tempting to call it bloodlust but that's way too strong a term but the idea is like as you're going around yharnam and hacking stuff up and absorbing pale uh not power blood like cold blood and stuff it's giving you this like it's leaving this taste with you of like oh this blood's actually kind of all right i'm liking this and then what the doll is doing is she is removing from you the echoes of blood and she's making you stronger that's what i will take the echoes of blood and transform them into your strength so throughout that night even though you are absorbing all of this like taste for blood and like i like this stuff the doll is taking it out of you and she's taking from you this thing that is making you weaker and turning to something that makes you stronger so that's why we don't go blood drunk but if you look at other characters like eileen eileen um eileen has been to the dream she's like they just like no question but she talks about it um eileen if she hunts too much she will go blood drunk during her game she kills the bloody presumably what happens is if you don't intervene she kills henrik as a result of killing henrik she tips over because she's got like more more blood blood echoes in her gas coin blood drunk um alfred like kind of goes blood he goes a little crazy it's not clear like he just goes yeah but again like it's not clear if like it's not clear he was always going to like murder annalise horribly but it's not clear that like it's possible that the act of killing her sort of tipped him over into that yeah she's very special so i imagine that like the corrupted like within her probably yeah yeah and like when you fight him he's like you're spilling my blood it's like yelling at you and um all these characters who go blood drunk the idea being that like the doll is sort of like removing from them the lust for blood and that seems to be a a feature of when she was initially built she wasn't built to um she wasn't built as like a weird humanoid blood purifier she was built it says because the person who built her who we now understand to be german built her because he felt lonely he felt this longing and he needed like he needed a friend he needed someone who was with him to keep him sane so you can see like okay that's now that she's in the dream and she's kind of become sentient that transfers from being like i need this doll around to keep me stable too the doll is actually alive now and she is literally keeping people stable by removing this taint from their body yeah um i really like even though it probably wasn't designed that way eileen she has like a plague doctor's beak mask with like incense in the bottom and every single part of her body is covered up so it's like oh yeah probably getting a bit of blood on you because when you kill enemies it splatters all over the place that's that it's not just that you absorb blood echoes it's that you literally are covered in the thing yeah and that's what feeding your blood um not blood lust your will for blood or whatever it is cainhurst says that as well that like the the armor in cainhurst is very thin it's like they describe it as being it's almost like tissue paper even though it's metal but the purpose of it is to repel blood it's not necessarily to actually offer you physical defense it's that yeah tainted blight if it touches you let's go off the armor yeah um so um we did this last time that's the last ama we spontaneously sung tainted blood is that a real song tainted love is a real song oh we just replaced one of the words this time from uh fallout no it's a little it's a little it's a little too late for fallout we're talking like 80s classic by soft cell oh no it's um there's a cover of it in one of the bioshocks yeah that's what i'm thinking um okay so we uh we go to the hunter's dream we don't get blood drawn yeah um go searching for pale blood eventually it leads us to the nightmare of menses um why does silencing the newborns cry and the hunt very good question very good question no one really knows um what basically i i think the idea is that once rom dies and the red moon descends it becomes like okay now things have gotten serious so the goal is no longer to to just mop up this it's actually to like get to the core of it that's why you get like the note says um was it like stopped the source of the spreading scourge of beasts and yeah something yeah and i mean like the source of the spreading scourge of beasts is the menses ritual because what's happening is that menses are using murgo to like bait a great one so once you s once you interrupt the ritual get rid of mikalash get murgo back from the wet nurse um yanum will queenie island with the city of queen yarn and we'll just go thank you and she will disappear and that seems to be like what ends the scourge of beasts like when when you wake up the following morning i'm assuming you do the the red moon's gone it's gone in the dream and it's gone in yana sorry yes sin sorry i'll say it again yes sir what is this about reborn no good what what about the wrath of cause i was gonna say that's this old connection uh has a lot of issues yeah i was going to ask with uh with murko specifically and queen yarnham like she says thank you cause assumably uh the curse probably ends because you managed to silence the orphan's wrath you manage to silence virgos crying yeah it's the same idea yeah right yeah yeah um it goes back to that bond between mother and child yes yeah that's basically yeah the whole game is we've talked about it before and basically the whole game is a series of male academics encountering women and not understanding them and then trying to understand them by cutting them open and then realizing that they still don't understand them and then just sort of like giving up and saying okay i'll play along with what you want essentially that's the only way i can move forward is to sort of like actually empathize to a degree with what you want yeah at the end we managed to consume the madness of the third chords yeah the third chords they're not umbilical chords no they are a precursor except if you're playing in japan in which case the umbilical cord comes first yeah yeah well the thing about them is they're called an umbilical chord but if you look at how it's written it's like um i think the english does it with quotation marks but in japanese it uses those hooked brackets that are like the equivalent of writing something in quotation marks so it's an umbilical i'm doing like the dr evil quotes here it's an umbilical chord but that's not literally what it is that's what they're calling it because it functions like an umbilical cord in that it links the parent and the child so if you have like the orphan of causes umbilical cord it's a weird it looks like a cochlea it doesn't look like an umbilical cord at all it's just like a weird like spiral hunk of flesh but what that does is that's what connects the orphan of cause to cause even now that both of them are gone it's like this it's this like raiification of the connection they've made it they've made it physical so if you have that then you can use that to try and talk to cars that's how they all work so when we take these chords into ourselves well we don't even take them into us as we it's not clear what we actually do with them um they're not they presumably aren't single use because we can pick them up off people who've used them before i think it's just a gameplay consideration that you get to use them once but um yeah yeah like when we're using that we're like basically using this thing to reach out to coz or um whoever is the child of the the great one we got that chord from and it's like we we've established a link because they're reaching down to us it's like it's like the creation of man with da vinci thing was sort of like reaching up and touching like this or else i'm wrong yeah but just reaching up and touching like this um i i'd like listeners to know that he he did not actually illustrate how da vinci uh the creation of man works they're just like this yeah i'm using all my fingers because i'm a little tiny picture in the corner it's this so yeah he like interlocked all of his hands still i'll do some shitty graphics to illustrate this so yeah we're doing that we're doing that with the great ones that's why the um the chords by the end of the game we're like we're so in touch that we have the ability to transcend but that's why we need three of them because one is not enough and that's also goes back to that cause is probably alive in some form in that the court still works you're still reaching out who caught yeah well cars is like cause is still alive in some form because when you when you defeat the orphan um the curse is lifted so because like again like it's working on the logic of like a ghost story in that like this terrible thing happened and we're setting it right and that sort of like calms the angry specters so causes ghosts survive we're talking about names actually that like coz's name in japanese is like it's a ghost but it's called ghost like like like throaty or ghost so she's meant she is a ghost that's the idea she's the ghost that is haunting you and if we yeah if if we calm the the ghost then we calm everything else so she's she died but like her spirit is well it's hard to say because they're all like they're like super beings who are beyond comprehension and we're getting going back to lifecraft the whole idea of like that is not dead which can't eternal lies so cause isn't really dead and like maybe rom is dead but rob is in the dream and nikolas is dead but nikolas in the dream i don't think mikolas can eternally lie you know what i would have thought was cool if uh after you kill mikalash if you went back to the advent plaza if his mummy was like it would have moved a little bit like it's just on the ground like crawling but it died on the way yeah that'd be great like he had to go back into that horrible body yeah yeah yeah that would have been yeah um so we i don't know i um we absorb inherit the madness of the courts we use the courts to call to the great ones whatever it is um and it's kind of funny because analysis court is a court we had already used so but um we are able to uh reject german and then we fight the moon presence and the moon presence so it's not explained exactly how we repel the moon presence it's just like at a certain point we have enough celestial protection well all right what it looks like and this is like important because when you beat the game you go into new game plus and it's you see the same thing happen again like you could go through the intro again and i think this is why it's important that the seek pale blood mode is there because it's to re if you just got that ending and then you go into the next game cycle and you see next to you seek pale blood to transcend the hunt it's like oh that's what i did i transcended the hunt and i found the pale blood and the pale blood was like the sky to let me contact the main person okay so the other instance in which we see you repelling something is the intro it's when the messengers crawl on you and then you see the the sort of like it's clearly metaphorical the the sort of like the the beast made of blood is reaching out to touch you and then when it touches you it suddenly is pushed back by something and catches fire and melts which is presumably this is like this is us inoculating you you have the protection of the doll protection of the message it's going to stop you going blood dragon i always i always read that as th this is beast hood creeping up on you and then maybe flora or whatever touches you connects you to the dream and then it's able to yes it's right you see it right before the messengers crawl on you so it's clearly like the messengers did it so um what it's the same thing the moon presence reaches out to grab you if you've got the chords it's suddenly repelled in the same way it's like what so my take on it is if you don't have the chords she just enslaves you she just wraps herself around you and the next thing you see you've taken german's place but i think the idea is that she tries to wrap herself around she's pushed back and she realizes that you are becoming as powerful as she is yeah she's like that's yeah she's like nani nani she does that that's why she's trying to kill you because she's like oh [ __ ] like this thing is stronger than i am that's why she's frantically trying to kill you and i think like a lot of people were assuming that killing the moon presence is actually what makes you change into a great one um i think in in line with the note that says hunt the great ones it's in bergenworth but like i think honestly you were on the way to becoming a great one that's why she freaks out and killing her yeah it's just like you know however long you play bloodborne it's still just set during one night however many times you have played after using the chords you still just transform after killing it's just like the story needs to take place somehow yeah yeah just yeah so you um end up i think like when you when you are transformed it's not clear how long it's been um it's not clear exactly what happened and it ain't like how does time even work in a dream who knows but like yeah i think and you become a baby great one you don't like turn into like a full-blown like squid monster really you're like the size of like this bottle that i'm holding up now that's not going to be in the chat um but like yeah i think the idea is you're just you're you're just too powerful to control at this point and that's why she's trying to kill you and the transformation sort of maybe would have happened anyway because you're so close it's really yeah that's really interesting the idea that in the beginning you repel the beast in the end you repel the black one yeah i never and that reconnected with me before ahead of that you haven't played it 70 times in a row richie yes sir sir i had a vision okay in bloodborne 2. no matter where you are in the game after 100 hours in gameplay you turn into a little baby great one slug just block thank you sen thank you thank you soon good contribution um yeah so we become a great one um [Music] what happens like what what are the ramifications of this well what it says is that you become a great one lifting humanity into its next childhood which is again going back to the cycle idea that it'll just happen again so like we talked a little about lauren and coz and stuff but the the the implication jose a lot the implication of the way the dlc is constructed and how it interfaces with the base game is that lauren happened before janam it was like the previous time this happened was this place called lauren and cause was the great one created when that happened so we are just like becoming the next cods so in however long it will be like a thousand years or 500 years or whatever archaeologists will stumble on the ruins of yharnam they'll wonder what the hell happened here they'll start probing and they'll find like the remnants of what we did and we will be the cause we will be like the great one that they encounter maybe even um yeah maybe even humans will continue building on top of yharnam yeah what we can forget that they were ever human yeah exactly yeah and like um yeah like the the hunters nightmare that we that will become the next time this happens that will still be there and it will be the equivalent of the nightmare frontier it will be like we found this place what is it they'll measure and they'll problem they might kill us and then we'll curse them and then they'll end up with their own and this will just happen over and over and over again the hunter is uh the hunter is cost theory confirmed yes yep yeah all right then um i'd like to talk a bit about the ramifications of the ending uh before we end this so the idea seems to be because this is a very eastern game um that you are going through like this it is this cycle until you finally are able to sort of transcend that's a very buddhist idea um you talked once about uh how the doll also fits that mold because she manages so you managed to leave behind everything that made you yeah and you're able to sort of move on to this next stage of being whereas the doll is able to also the doll as like an as like a component of maria maria throws away the rakuyosi she changes her ways she becomes a kinder person that kind person aspect of her gets removed from her lives on yeah and is that yeah because when when maria finally like is sort of calmed and passes on the doll the doll says like i felt something and she can't explain it she says it was like being liberated from shackles because the thing about maria is that like when we encounter maria because it's a dream we encounter like a version of maria that is like hunter maria where she's got like her transforming rakuyo thing and she's got like the the leather get up and everything and she's like throwing she's like stabbing herself and throwing like gouts of blood at you and everything but that's not what maria was actually like at the end of her life um that's like maria is like that in the dream because it is what she feared being it's what she's frightened of and it's like how ludwig is a piece yeah like a lawrence is a beast yeah because if you listen to like how other people talk about maria they're like she's like this this calming presence she's like you know i need you to come to me and calm me like where i hold my hand please they don't talk about her as that that person and like even if you look at how maria is talked about in in text it's like she threw her sword away because she didn't want to be that person anymore so you can see like she is struggling with that like that murderous person trying to get that out of her and she's trying very hard to be like the doll essentially yeah and it's very it should be noted that she is anchored to a point in like the nightmare is a linear walk back in time she is anchored to a point prior to having made the transition fully yeah yeah so it's kind of like the nightmare again it punishes lawrence by stealing his mind it punishes ludwig by making him a beast it punishes maria by anchoring her to this person which she doesn't want yeah yeah and like i i get why like some people are reticent to look at it that way because hunter maria is pretty cool she's like she looks cool she does all these like spinny things and she can like set her blood on fire and like teleport around the room and stuff but like if you look at maria's just biography and how she's talked about like she was trying to not be that because she that person did so much damage and she's trying to be like a good person she's trying to be a kind person and a supportive person so even though like the doll is not maria's spirit stuck inside a doll it's like something of maria is in there and basically maria is able to leave all of like the hunter part of her behind and just be like not become that person but for just that that aspect of her to live onto something else yeah and that's really beautiful yeah because it's kind of like we live onto something else as well cause we live on as a great one so the final the final shot of that is it's two it's two beings who managed to transcend their origins um sort of looking out onto the new world which is a good ending yeah so it's not just uh a gothic action game about killing snail monsters well werewolves what what i mean i don't want to go off on another tangent but what i find interesting is that like it initially presents itself as a gothic thing then it goes off into this lovecraftian thing that recontextualizes it all but then ultimately the logic at the end of the story is still like gothic horror logic because you still have to like quiet like the the like the mother who went through all of these like traumas and fix up history and stuff and the the great ones even though there's that very very clear like these things are just straight up like lovecraftian monsters what makes them distinct and what actually allows the story to progress is that they have comprehensible human motives and human emotions that you can connect to like they want children they're like in mourning and they're like they suffer grief and things and that's what makes them comprehensible to people it's why you can you can make pacts with them and things so ultimately like it sort of it does a big loop it starts gothic and then it goes weird and then it the ultimate the ending is still like is still you know right the wrong that was done to queen yharnam and to cause and then once that's done the ghosts fade away which is very like that's not really lovecraftian it's more that's just back to gothic again well soon richie it's nice to having you it's nice to have you i've been on your uh channel so very often no you finally get to be on mine we run our channel discussing jojo's bizarre adventure though i like the other's bizarre adventure we'll do another one of those in like a few years uh so uh yeah where can people find you guys just let you leave all of your plugs simpson can do this part she's the she's the one who does okay so people can find richie and i on youtube.com sinclair lore home of the best reborn content in the world we also do some soulsborne stuff once in a while yeah yeah once in a while you have like 20 episodes or something about the notes of bloodborne yeah asa was not joking there is a separate um between 20 and 30 minute video for every single note that you find on the ground um answering questions such as who left it what were they trying to communicate if um if people have any more questions about bloodborne they could reach out to you i imagine like on twitter or whatever but also you probably have done like a really exhaustive extensive video on every topic so you know upcoming project is to do one on every door um an interesting thing happened today i noticed there's a button on youtube that says play all if you click it and once you click it it sort of compiles i guess everything that's public on your channel into a giant playlist that you can just listen to and we have over 1500 videos i i did not know that most of them but it feels like we do so [Laughter] yeah so this is like you know you have like vadi who's doing one video a month but it's like it's it's got all that like production values and it was like really like focused on like one thing and then with us it's just like drop half an hour and they record a nook just that we just like hey let's talk about the lock shield for an hour explain the lock shield and you know no you talked about it for five minutes then you just did like an hour of nothing that was the beginning of like people because when we started doing this it was just like a question kind of like what we're doing with you now or it was a question and answer thing of like what do you think about this open good listening and then what happened was just like not even gradually but like quite quickly people just liked the asides where we would argue with each other about like and like sin would like get mad and leave and go make a coffee or something people just started liking that uh where which was the episode with uh was it like deep sea were you well was it psychosomatic scurvy i don't remember the genesis of psychosomatics it was either deep sea or great lake it was one of them it was one of those groups of course we do yeah people people need to find that specific episode because that's i think the funniest bit you guys ever did everything is entirely scripted by the way oh yeah that's the best part people do think this is scripted and i'm just like i am offended by the notion that i would sit down and actually write this out like if no this is clearly people arguing in the middle of the night but also like surely the writing would get better over time oh like we are just like oh i'm so looking for the best part is this people who are like wow like i used to listen to them all the time but lately like they just seemed disillusioned is six years old like there's not i don't know if you want us to sit there and just repeat the story about eileen over and over again but eventually it's gonna it's gonna become this like there's a no one else is doing regular blood-borne content there isn't any it's just us and as so it has to be this because i don't know what you want to do i don't know if he wants to do like rediscover the law of bloodborne because that's not going to work it's got to be doors of bloodborne there's got to be runes with bloodborne it's got to be tyra banks it's got to be it really well i'm talking to a slug i think it really hurt you guys psychologically that alden ring got pushed back you needed that game i uh highly recommend people go watch your channel excellent stuff and i'm very thankful first of all to all the help you gave me during the bloodborne commentary uh if i got anything wrong and having talked to you now i've noticed like two or three things i got wrong people are going to come after you good good yes like when you said um where can people find you on social media and i said nothing that's why [Music] because i i enjoyed several years of well actually until i just um i just hid behind sen so [Laughter] these you can find me on discord and that's all thank you guys so much thank you too um goodbye bye bye thanks for having us on a sir we're reflexively waving even though we're not on camera do you want like multiple takes like thank you for having us on thanks for having us on i'm not [Music] oh yes well you've come to the right place yharnam is the home of blood administration you need only unravel its mystery you

Channel: AesirAesthetics

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Keywords: Aesir, Aesthetics, AesirAesthetics, video game, in, depth, analysis, explained, bloodborne, lore, vaatividya, sinclair, sinclairlore, richard, pillbeam, jsf, silvermont, illusory, wall

Id: CVP7XEc9jyw

Length: 116min 41sec (7001 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021